We are honored to have so many of you following our website (500 as of last week!). Thank you so much. I am sorry for not posting for a while. Things have been a bit chaotic, but I am back at it. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do… The articles posted here are those that I’ve been saving from May 2 until today.

Stories of the Day

The Democrat’s are getting awfully testy. “MacCallum wondered why Democrats, including former National Security advisor Tom Donilon, wouldn’t want to participate in the select committee if they don’t have anything to be afraid of. Beckel said he has spoken to Donilon, who said that he wasn’t there the day of the Benghazi attack. “He’s the National Security advisor. He was not in the loop?” MacCallum questioned. “Bob, our consulate is under attack in Benghazi. You’re telling me Tom Donilon says he wasn’t there?” Beckel shot back, “What is it that you need to find out? Let me see if I can understand this now. What the Republicans are after, what you’re suggesting to me is we need to find out who got it in Rhodes head and said ‘write that.’” ‘What Are Dems Afraid Of?’: MacCallum, Beckel Go Head-to-Head Over Benghazi Investigation

Maybe this is one reason why they’re so testy. “Worse for Obama, Rasmussen found that 59 percent feel it is unlikely the administration has revealed all of the details of the episode. And 50 percent are not satisfied with the administration’s story they’ve heard.” Poll: 72% want the truth about Benghazi

These Democrats have no honor. “Honorable people do not let American diplomats twist slowly in the wind while they attend “debate prep” and rest up for a shakedown meeting with the One Percent. Honorable people do not suddenly go AWOL while American soil is under attack. Honorable people do not fail to mobilize the formidable resources of the American military, even if it might not be possible for them to get there in time. Honorable people, under questioning by Congress, do not lose their temper and start shouting. Honorable people do not look the bereaved in the eye and lie about who and what killed their loved ones. Further: honorable people do not go before the public on the Sunday talk shows and knowingly transmit a bald-faced lie. Honorable people do not continue to lie about what took place. Honorable people do not say “We are Americans; we hold our head high,” and then hang their heads in shame as they cut and run at the first sign of trouble. Honorable people do not continue to reward the dishonorable with ever-higher posts. Honorable people resign. And until honorable people are restored to Washington — not credentialed Ivy League lawyers with high name recognition steeped in cheap Marxism and fashionable anti-American contempt, but genuine patriots who understand that something has gone terribly wrong with America and needs to be redressed — there will be no justice for the victims of Benghazi. As the Left likes to say: no justice, no peace.” Why Benghazi Matters

“Watergate defines the vocabulary for American political scandals, and so it was no surprise that former Obama-administration communications operative Anita Dunn took to the airwaves yesterday morning to pour derision upon the notion that a “smoking gun” has been uncovered in the form of recently released e-mails documenting the White House’s disinformation campaign following the Benghazi attack. A dozen Democrats have asked, “Where’s the scandal?” But the question here is not whether the administration’s misleading statements in the wake of the attacks on U.S. installations in Egypt and Libya are a political scandal in the style of President Nixon’s infamous burglary; they aren’t. But that the administration’s misdeeds here seem to fall short of felony burglary hardly makes the matter a less serious one: The White House misled the American public about a critical matter of national interest, and it continues to practice deceit as the facts of the case are sorted out. That, to answer Hillary Clinton’s callous question, is what difference it makes.” Why Benghazi Matters

“Are Barack and Hillary viewed the same way within the administration? Are they mere seat-warmers, considered too inept to be involved in serious decision-making? Are golfing and fundraising Obama’s only skills? Is Hillary useless in the clutch? If the Democrats think these questions are going away, they are mistaken. Obama doesn’t have to stand for election again, so maybe he can brazen it out. But if Hillary runs for president in 2016, the question everyone will want to know the answer to is: What did you do on the night of September 11, 2012?” WHERE WAS BARRY? WHERE WAS HILLARY?

“This president does love speech-making, often on minute public issues. Why the suspicious silence on his Benghazi doings? So, let’s turn the question around: What could President Barack Hussein Obama have possibly been doing that deadly night, what could his physical and mental condition have been that’s so terrible and shocking that the know-everything chief executive would rather Americans think he was asleep at the national security switch? That’s something to awaken any American at 3 a.m. — or earlier.” What was Obama really doing during Benghazi?

“Obama avoided the situation room that night because the decisions he was making — just two months before a tightly contested election — were political, not military. There was a precedent of which Hillary was fully aware. On the night of July 17, 1996, two FAA air traffic controllers observed an unknown object intersecting Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 as it headed east off Long Island’s south shore. A manager from that center faxed the radar data to FAA headquarters in Washington, and from there it was rushed “immediately” to the White House situation room.” What Obama Did on September 11, 2012

“Can the Democrats possibly get away with the claim that there is no Benghazi scandal, even though four Americans were killed, including an ambassador, and we already know that 1) the Obama administration ignored repeated calls for improved security in Benghazi, 2) the administration made no attempt to rescue the besieged Americans, over a period of seven or eight hours, and 3) the administration’s attempted cover-up–al Qaeda is on the run, this was just a bunch of film critics who got out of hand–has already been exposed? One wouldn’t think so. And, by the way, we still don’t know what (if anything) either President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton did with regard to the terrorist attack on the evening of September 11, 2012. Did they participate? Did they give any orders, and if so, what were they? Were Obama and Clinton even awake? We don’t know.” ON BENGHAZI, DEMS DOUBLE DOWN ON DENIAL

“We are left with this reality: Top diplomats and intelligence officers in Libya offered assessments of the Benghazi attacks that were true when they made them and remain true today. But top Obama administration officials ignored those assessments. Six weeks before the 2012 presidential election, those officials—at the direction of White House communications and political strategists desperate to maintain the fiction that al Qaeda was “on the run”—lied to the public about how four Americans were killed in a sophisticated attack carried out, on the anniversary of 9/11, by terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda.” Benghazi Lies

“In the most revealing glimpse of the administration’s depravity, the president and secretary of state peddled the lie even in their mawkish eulogies to their buddy “Chris” and three other dead Americans. They lied to the victims’ coffins and then strolled over to lie to the bereaved, Hillary telling the Woods family that “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.” And she did. The government dispatched more firepower to arrest Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in Los Angeles than it did to protect its mission in Benghazi. It was such a great act of misdirection Hillary should have worn spangled tights and sawn Stevens’s casket in half. As I wrote a week before the 2012 election: And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as Secretary Clinton threatened, “have that person arrested.” And, in the weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state, complete with the midnight knock on the door from not-so-secret policemen sent to haul the designated fall-guy into custody. Decency, I argued, required that Obama & Co be voted out of office as an urgent act of political hygiene. The electorate felt differently – and still does. Democrat spinners openly giggle when a TV interviewer uses the word “Benghazi”: It’s a big nothingburger; the American people have, in that Clintonian formulation, “moved on”; this is the tired old “partisan politics as usual…” The Dishonored Dead

“Now, on to the real news: the grave affairs of state in the Obama administration are in the hands of incompetent, inexperienced people who are not up to the responsibilities they wield. If you are wondering how someone so callow came to such a position, read this and weep. He started as a van driver. Jonathan Karl, Richard Coolidge, and Jordyn Phelps wrote over a year ago:

Tommy Vietor started working for Barack Obama when he was still Senator Obama–well before he became a presidential candidate–and until Friday, the 32-year-old Vietor hadn’t stopped. His first job for Obama was as the driver of a press van, and he rose up the ranks through the 2008 campaign, and then the White House press office, to become the National Security Council spokesman.

Now leaving the White House to open a political communications firm with the president’s departing speechwriter Jon Favreau, Vietor says it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work for the president. [Snip]

Then there is Valerie Jarrett, who appears to be running the country while Obama plays golf, shoots hoops, parties, and has “downtime,” as Michelle Obama recently called it, with his family, watching TV. Even among foreign policy appointees with actual credentials, such as UN Ambassador Samantha Power who has a PhD, it is all theory and no actual experience and an inability to follow through on all the fine words she has written. As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit so often sarcastically remarks, ‘The country is in the best of hands.’” The appalling Obama foreign policy team: The case of Tommy Vietor

“The former Democratic Congresswoman went too far on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday. She intended, I think, to present the Democrats’ talking points on Benghazi, but at one point — in just a few words — she let us see the way Democratic Party strategists are talking to each other behind the scenes about the effect the talking points are supposed to have on the public mind. I’m visualizing a memo that has bullet points of what one ought to say out loud and a narrative section of things you don’t want to say. [Snip] And on saying that phrase “intelligence failure,” and just before saying “it’s time to move on and focus on the real problems,” she wedges this in:

And, by the way, this was an intelligence failure. But it wasn’t a conspiracy.And there aren’t aliens in Area 51 and Vince Foster wasn’t murdered.

And there aren’t aliens in Area 51 and Vince Foster wasn’t murdered. That was too revealing! I suspect… Look, I realize I can be accused of “conspiracy” thinking to suspect something and to speak as if I know what they’re saying behind our back… but here’s the kind of thing Harman’s Area-51-Vince-Foster remark made me feel they are saying in private:We need people to hear the word “Benghazi” as a buzzword of nuts. Somebody says “Benghazi” and the reflex reaction is “Oh, no, here we go again with the conspiracy theories.” It should be like when somebody brings up Area 51 or Vince Foster was murdered. A normal person is like “Ugh! Leave me alone.” That’s the way “Benghazi” should feel. Somebody says “Benghazi” and all anybody thinks is “conspiracy nutcase.”Nobody who wants to be considered mainstream in this election should be able to say “Benghazi” anymore.” Jane Harman recited not the talking points, but the opposite of talking points on Benghazi

A Fox News exclusive from yesterday. “Documents reviewed by Fox News show there are differences between Benghazi emails released through the federal courts to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and emails released to the House oversight committee as part of its investigation into the attacks. The discrepancies are fueling allegations the administration is holding back documents to Congress. “The key question is whether Congress now has all the documents,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a member of the oversight committee, said. As for differences between the two sets of documents, Chaffetz alleged: “’They are playing games. The classification and redactions are different. Why should Judicial Watch get more than Congress after issuing a subpoena?’” Discrepancies between Benghazi emails released to Congress, watchdog group

“How bad would it have been to own up to what happened in Benghazi and Cairo?” “The odd thing is that Benghazi did not have to be a scandal. We may be used to, if not exactly resigned to, politicians who distort the facts or fabricate outright lies when it seems politically necessary to do so; nobody really expected Bill Clinton, a man constitutionally incapable of honestly answering a question about what he wants for lunch, to simply confess to what he was up to with the White House intern pool. What’s unusual in this case is the unnecessary dishonesty, as though the Obama administration simply reflexively recoiled from the truth.” Unnecessary Lies: On Benghazi, the administration misled not out of necessity but out of habit.

“House Republicans have decided the select committee to investigate the Benghazi terror attack will include seven Republicans and five Democrats, according to two senior House GOP leadership aides. The House is expected to vote on the legislation establishing the panel later this week. Earlier Tuesday, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi demanded it be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Now that the committee’s structure has been decided, it’s unclear whether Democrats will participate.” Benghazi panel will have 7 Republicans, 5 Democrats

“News out of Nigeria continues to horrify, as the radical Islamist group Boko Haram refuses to release kidnapped school girls and now threatens to sell them into marriage, slavery, or worse. Boko Haram, whose very name in Hausa professes the sinfulness of Western education, roots its belief in religion although, as is so often the case, it often confuses pure theology with local custom. For its victims, however, such footnotes are academic. The group has become infamous in Nigeria for the slaughter of Christians. Boko Haram is neither the first nor will it be the last group to spark outrage on the world stage by embracing and imposing retrograde religious interpretation on society.” Address, Don’t Deny Religious Component to Boko Haram

Big Government

Almost everything the government does has unintended consequences. “It’s yet another lesson in the law of unintended consequences — and, as usual, the government wants us to pick up the tab for its poor planning. This time, it’s the Obama administration’s proposal to allow tolls on interstate highways, where such tolls have been banned since the Eisenhower days. The problem is that government efforts to discourage driving and to encourage fuel conservation have been successful. With people burning less gas, revenues from the gasoline tax are down. People burning less gas is what the government wanted. But with gas prices at historically high levels (often over four bucks a gallon), and with trust in governmentat historic lows, politicians aren’t too enthusiastic about taking the obvious step, increasing the gas tax. They don’t want to take the heat. Instead, they’re looking to increase revenue in other, less obvious ways.” Obama’s highway tolls take cash, time and privacy: Column

“Schneider struck on ominous tone when discussing the path he sees the country on. “Democracies don’t end well. We are sliding very fast towards fascism. It’s an ugly kind of thing. There’s this kind of mob mentality that we have to be careful of,” he said. He believes comedians are pressured toward one side of the political spectrum. “There’s a polarization that’s happening…I do think you look can look at government and go, ‘Wow, it is out of control now,’ and if you do criticize or tend to be not directly along a liberal stand, you can get murdered,” Schneider commented.” Rob Schneider Tells Chris Stigall: We Are Sliding Very Fast Towards Fascism

“To some extent, the soaring number of disabled Americans has been facilitated by an explicit or implicit relaxing of the standards for total disability. And there may also be a scandal embedded in the disability totals: large numbers of Americans now considered to be disabled are so classified because of an alleged inability to speak English. The tireless Senator Jeff Sessions wrote this letter earlier today to Carolyn Colvin, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration.” THE UNITED STATES OF DISABILITY

This is not from The Onion. “The [Federal Trade] Commission promulgates substantive rules of conduct. The Commission then considers whether to authorize investigations into whether the Commission’s rules have been violated. If the Commission authorizes an investigation, the investigation is conducted by the Commission, which reports its findings to the Commission. If the Commission thinks that the Commission’s findings warrant an enforcement action, the Commission issues a complaint. The Commission’s complaint that a Commission rule has been violated is then prosecuted by the Commission and adjudicated by the Commission. This Commission adjudication can either take place before the full Commission or before a semi-autonomous Commission administrative law judge. If the Commission chooses to adjudicate before an administrative law judge rather than before the Commission and the decision is adverse to the Commission, the Commission can appeal to the Commission. If the Commission ultimately finds a violation, then, and only then, the affected private party can appeal to an Article III court. But the agency decision, even before the bona fide Article III tribunal, possesses a very strong presumption of correctness on matters both of fact and of law.” THE PROBLEM OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE, IN ONE PARAGRAPH

Common Core

“I finished administering the sixth day of New York State Common Core assessments. I was a facilitator in a process that made my 10-year-old students struggle ,to the point of frustration, to complete yet another 90-minute test. I sat by as I watched my students attempt to answer questions today that were beyond their abilities. I knew the test booklets I put in front of them contained questions that were written in a way that 95 percent of them had no chance of solving. I even tried to give my students a pep talk, in hopes of alleviating their angst, when I knew damn well they didn’t stand a chance. Today I was part of the problem.” Today was the first day I was ever ashamed to be a teacher

“Not every stupid decision by a school administrator should be laid at the feet of Common Core, but because Common Core is transforming public education it will be easy to blame it for any bad decisions. Indeed, some particularly stupid administrators will even rationalize their stupid decisions by saying Common Core made them do it. Enter Mohammad Z. Islam, the interim school superintendent for the Rialto Unified School District and the rest of the gang who thought it was a great idea to ask eighth-grade students to write an essay picking a side to the question, Did the Holocaust happen or was it “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.” From the San Bernadino Sun, which broke this story:

The Common Core state standards, which have been adopted by most states and the District of Columbia, emphasize critical thinking in students, which is what the assignment is intended to teach, according to school board member Joe Martinez.

“One of the most important responsibilities for educators is to develop critical thinking skills in students,” Martinez wrote in an email Friday morning. “This will allow a person to come to their own conclusion. Current events are part of the basis for measuring IQ. The Middle East, Israel, Palestine and the Holocaust are on newscasts discussing current events. Teaching how to come to your own conclusion based on the facts, test your position, be able to articulate that position, then defend your belief with a lucid argument is essential to good citizenship. This thought process creates the foundation for a good education. The progression is within district board policy and also supports the district’s student inspired motto: ‘Today’s Scholars, Tomorrow’s Leaders.’” Rot In Common Core

“Someone had the bright idea of pairing public high school kids from a low-income neighborhood in the Bronx with kids from a private high school that charges $43,000 a year. When the low-income youngsters visited the posh private school, “they were just overwhelmed” by it, according to the New York Times. “One kid ran crying off campus.” Apparently others felt “so disheartened about their own circumstances.” What earthly good did that do for these young people? Thank heaven no one was calloused enough to take me on a tour of a posh private school when I was growing up in Harlem. [Snip] At a time when American youngsters are consistently outperformed on international tests by youngsters in other countries, do we have the luxury of spending our children’s time on things that will do absolutely nothing for them in the years ahead? Are children just playthings for adults? Maybe the affluent kids can afford to waste their time this way, because they will be taken care of, one way or another, in later life. But to squander the time of poor kids, for whom education is often their only hope of escaping poverty, is truly an irresponsible self-indulgence by adults who should know better, and it is one more sign of the moral bankruptcy of too many people in our schools.” Education and Moral Bankruptcy

“Rick Santorum is rebranding himself. With the bruising 2012 primary behind him and another presidential bid in his sights, the former Pennsylvania senator and famous culture warrior is out with a new book, Blue Collar Conservatives, that puts his longstanding interest in working-class issues at the fore. Defeating same-sex marriage has become reclaiming marriage culture. His new book’s index doesn’t have one reference to abortion, and it’s barely mentioned in the text at all. In Santorum’s much-longer 2005 work, It Takes a Family, several chapters are devoted to abortion. Medicaid goes from one mention in his 2005 book’s index to five in this book’s. It’s working-class concerns, not “social issues,” that Santorum says turned his months-long slog through Iowa in 2011 and 2012 into an incredible upset victory in the state’s caucuses.” Rick Santorum’s New Culture War: He wants the Republican party to stand for work and family — and thinks it doesn’t right now.

Fast and Furious

From a former member of the intelligence committee who wishes to remain anonymous: Do we really want to continue down this road where we cannot trust our government? “For politicians, the tried and true national security/intel operation distracter still works to provide cover to prevent investigations from holding people accountable for their criminal acts. Outside the beltway, the information age, coupled with coverage of multiple scandals involving the Obama administration and its national security apparatus renders this strategy obsolete. A congressional committee investigation has a challenge in this area, however. If we thought subpoenaed emails were difficult to obtain for the Benghazi investigation, classified documents would be more problematic. It’s also possible that the assessments have either been purged from the system or the audit trail has been gradually massaged over the years to reflect reporting more in tune with reality. If Issa decides to reenergize the investigation he should turn to the people side of the equation, and hope someone like Brigadier General Lovell will come forward to speak the truth about Fast and Furious.” The Fast and Furious Red Herring

Islam in America

“Arab Winter Comes to America warns that understanding the motives that drive our enemies may be our first line of defense. It argues that we cannot begin to fight a war against the enemy that has brought savage carnage into our skies and our cities until we understand his goals and ambitions. Ideological wars do not begin on the battlefield though they may end there. They are fought in the hearts and minds of men. Arab Winter Comes to Americais anothercontribution to the Counterjihad which Robert Spencer has been fighting for so long. It is not a war that any of us has chosen, but it is a war that we have faced for over a thousand years. And it is not going away any time soon.” Arab Winter Comes to America

Jobs

“But in a broader sense, the big April number merely offsets bad winter weather and gets nonfarm payrolls back to their long-term trend. Over the past three years, monthly payrolls have averaged 187,000. With the April report, the establishment survey’s trend has moved back to 197,000 a month. If this were a truly strong and durable recovery, we’d be seeing monthly job gains closer to 300,000. Economist Scott Grannis writes that the April report “doesn’t alter the big picture: private sector jobs have been growing by about 2 percent a year for the past several years. That’s enough to give us 2 to 3 percent overall growth but not much more.” Looking under the hood, important glitches continue to plague the employment situation. Wages were flat in April and average hourly earnings have increased only 1.9 percent over the past year. Aggregate hours worked gained only 2.4 percent. Putting the two together, you get a modest 4.3 percent increase for nominal GDP (5 or 6 percent would be better). And there are still far too many people not working. The labor force participation rate actually fell from 63.2 percent to 62.8 percent for April. It’s the same bad sign that has plagued the duration of this recovery. Similarly, the employment-to-population ratio held steady at a low 58.9 percent. That ratio peaked at 63.4 percent in 2007 during the last cyclical recovery. At the 2000 cyclical peak, the employment ratio was 64.6 percent. Wall Street economist Michael Darda argues that one of the big wage and jobs problems is “low employment ratios for prime age workers,” adding that “the employment/population ratio for the 25 to 54 segment remains more than 3 percentage points below pre-crisis levels.” Facts like these should stop Democrats from jumping in the air and clicking their heels. There are too many part-time workers, long-term unemployed, and labor-market dropouts to validate the significance of a 6.3 percent unemployment rate. The newspaper headlines tout falling unemployment, but ordinary folks on Main Street don’t really feel it.” Game-Changer Jobs Report? No. Dems shouldn’t jump for joy.

Why does Obama want to make it harder for Americans to find jobs? “Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on Tuesday blasted an Obama administration proposal to create up to 100,000 more guest worker permits for the spouses of foreign workers, calling it a plan that would keep 100,000 Americans from finding jobs. “Fifty million working-age Americans aren’t working,” said Sessions, an outspoken critic of Democratic immigration plans. “Yet the administration is now going to immediately add almost 100,000 new guest workers to compete against unemployed Americans.” GOP Senator: Obama’s Guest Worker Plan Cuts 100,000 Jobs for Americans

The Mainstream Media

“Over the last several decades, three things have happened: 1) The number of Democratic-identifying reporters increased steadily prior to a significant drop in the latest survey 2) The number of Republicans has steadily shrunk with that number dipping into single digits for the first time ever in the new survey c) more and more reporters are identifying as independents. What seems to be happening — at least in the last decade – -is that journalists are leaving both parties, finding themselves more comfortable as unaffiliateds. These numbers will likely affirm the belief in conservative circles that “all” reporters are secretly Democrats. (The study was conducted via online interviews with 1,080 reporters.) While I am not in the business of disputing the study’s finding, I would note two caveats: 1. This is among all reporters not just political reporters. While that may seem like a minor issue, it’s worth noting that assuming these party ID numbers are true for those of us — like me — who cover politics day in and day out may not be entirely accurate. 2. The movement toward independent status among reporters is in keeping with a similar move in the broader electorate as they find the two parties increasingly rigid and, therefore, less welcoming. The entire study, which details that journalists are less happy in their jobs than ever before and that most believe the industry is headed in the wrong direction, is worth reading in its entirety.” Just 7 percent of journalists are Republicans. That’s far fewer than even a decade ago.

“Comedy today is expected to suck up to the left and ridicule the right. Stray from that formula and there is a price to pay. Rulers have historically punished poorly performing jesters. Just as the left does today.” COURT JESTER JOURNALISTS

“How hard life must be for The One We’ve Been Waiting For, who must travel in this fallen world, amongst mortal man, tolerating such folly and failure? It’s little wonder that Mr. Obama, whom top aides referred to in the 2008 campaign as the “Black Jesus,” is disappointed in the world. But in return consider this: Think about how disappointed the world must be in Barack Obama. The man who promised to slow the rise of the oceans, heal the planet, and end a politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism–who promised us new beginnings and hope and change–has overseen an increasingly disordered and chaotic world, enemies who are emboldened and allies who are alienated, the worst economic recovery on record, startling failures plaguing his signature domestic achievement, a record number of Americans on food stamps and in poverty, a widening gap in income inequality, and a riven and polarized political culture. These are the hallmarks of a failed presidency. And the president and his courtiers are already settling on their explanation: Barack Obama was simply too good for the world. The president thinks we have failed him. In reality, he has failed us.” News Bulletin: Obama Believes He’s Too Good for Us

“By a ten-point margin, 53 percent v. 43 percent, those surveyed say the issue of which party controls Congress will be a factor in their vote–and those who say they feel that way are more likely to support the Republican contender. In addition, 26 percent say they think of their vote as a vote against Obama while only 16 percent as a vote for him. The mid-term elections are still six months away, but the political landscape for Democrats is perilous. And the odds are as good or better that things will get worse, not better, for Democrats between now and November. The American public, at least at this point, seem intent on deliver a stinging rebuke to President Obama, his party, and liberalism itself. The left, knowing this, is going to become even more desperate, more ad hominem, and more deranged in their attacks. It won’t alter the outcome. We are watching the Obama presidency die. The cause of death? Massive incompetence. Flawed ideology. And the Obama agenda coming into contact with reality.” Watching the Obama Presidency Die

It’s up to all of us to stand up for what’s right, on day at a time. “After giving the school multiple chances to correct its mistake, Mr. Rubeo had had enough. He enlisted the help of the Liberty Institute, an organization that specializes in promoting religious freedom. The Liberty Institute has now given the school district ten days to issue a written apology to Giovanni and restore its students’ rights to read a religious book during free reading time, threatening legal action if it doesn’t comply; in other words, these guys are not messing around. I bet the school is regretting it ever got into this mess…” Dad Serves Up A Warm Plate Of Constitutional Law To Teacher Who Banned Son From Reading Bible

Totalitarianism

“Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) trafficked in the culture of allegations of the “un-American.” He was censured by the United Senate and died disgraced. Now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is engaging in misconduct comparably shameful: “redbaiting” those with red state values. He deserves censure for such misconduct. If the Democrats will not provide it, if the Republicans regain the majority in the U.S. Senate the censuring of Harry Reid deserves to be the first order of business next year. Leader Reid has cast himself as the point man in a campaign by the left to vilify Charles and David Koch. As recently inventoried by The Washington Free Beacon, and as noted by The Washington Post, Reid has vilified the Koch name, at last count, 134 times. This is not a random act by Reid.” Harry Reid’s Neo-McCarthyist Vilification Of The Koch Brothers Begs For Censure

“The new liberal dogma says that a Jew or Christian is a bigot if they do not believe in the homosexual agenda. Consequently, a marriage counselor cannot discharge his functions correctly, a housing worker will discriminate against homosexual applicants, and a Christian law school will teach its lawyers to be bigots. Christians are told that their belief that marriage is between a man and woman is, in fact, not their true belief. Rather, they really believe that homosexuals are wicked sinners; and why, it is asked, should such beliefs be protected by the First Amendment? Surprisingly, I am not pessimistic because I believe that this latest attempt to dismantle the rule of law for political purposes will ultimately fail. It will fail because the brutality that lawlessness engenders will create such a climate of insecurity that even the elites will feel endangered. As they seek to protect themselves, the privileged position of some groups in society (I would submit that homosexual and Muslim groups fit into this category) will disappear. But the resulting damage may be lasting. The current brutality against Christians has the potential to develop into wider lawlessness and it is, simply, frightening. It is elite- and court-led; and in both the U.S. and UK, Congress and Parliament must re-assert their democratic authority. It is important that the U.S. and UK stay close, and that the values that have brought prosperity, and a healthy application of the rule of law, be cherished and preserved. The U.S. is the epicenter of freedom in the world, including religious freedom, and she must continue as the standard bearer. But the UK is a “pivotal influence state,” and what happens here is often followed in other countries. The challenge of liberal dogmatism, like the challenge of national and international socialism before it, requires a united and robust response.” The Brave New World of the West: There is something horribly familiar about recent events in the land of the free.

We’ve got a terrific line up for our annual Christmas program. First up will be the Ignite Barbershop Quartet. Ignite began singing together after a quartet matching party in November 2015. They are all Champion members of Region 21’s Scottsdale Chorus and they will be singing for us!

After lunch, Congressional District 6 congressman, Representative David Schweikart, will talk to us about what’s happening in Washington DC, and provide us with a status of the Tax Bill working its way through the House of Representatives and Senate.

Finally, member Julia Graham will install our new 2018/2019 officers. We look forward to seeing you and be sure to bring a friend or two or three!